Daily Comment on News and Issues of Interest to Michigan Lawyers

03/29/2012

Read This If You Remember Who Bill Ruckelshaus Is

William Ruckelshaus, who famously resigned his position as deputy Attorney General rather than carry out a Presidential order to fire Watergate special prosecutor Archibald Cox, has spoken for the first time in almost forty years about his role in the "Saturday Night Massacre." His speech in Seattle, filled with interesting tidbits for Watergate aficionados (including that Ruckelshaus was in Grand Rapids in the week leading up to the Saturday Night Massacre, includes this observation about the ethics of his situation:

I really did not believe the decision to resign was a difficult one. I don’t believe you resign from a presidential appointment without considerable cause. You owe a duty of loyalty to the President that transcends most other duties, save the paramount one owed to the American people themselves. Certainly you do not resign because you do not get your way or the President makes a decision contrary to what you might have done had you been elected president. That, of course, is precisely the point. He was elected and you were not. By the terms of your appointment, you serve at his pleasure.

However, when you accept a presidential appointment you must remind yourself there are lines over which you will not step — lines impossible to define in advance but nevertheless always present. The line for me was considerably behind where I would have been standing had I fired Cox. In this case, the line was bright and the decision was simple.

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Read This If You Remember Who Bill Ruckelshaus Is

William Ruckelshaus, who famously resigned his position as deputy Attorney General rather than carry out a Presidential order to fire Watergate special prosecutor Archibald Cox, has spoken for the first time in almost forty years about his role in the "Saturday Night Massacre." His speech in Seattle, filled with interesting tidbits for Watergate aficionados (including that Ruckelshaus was in Grand Rapids in the week leading up to the Saturday Night Massacre, includes this observation about the ethics of his situation:

I really did not believe the decision to resign was a difficult one. I don’t believe you resign from a presidential appointment without considerable cause. You owe a duty of loyalty to the President that transcends most other duties, save the paramount one owed to the American people themselves. Certainly you do not resign because you do not get your way or the President makes a decision contrary to what you might have done had you been elected president. That, of course, is precisely the point. He was elected and you were not. By the terms of your appointment, you serve at his pleasure.

However, when you accept a presidential appointment you must remind yourself there are lines over which you will not step — lines impossible to define in advance but nevertheless always present. The line for me was considerably behind where I would have been standing had I fired Cox. In this case, the line was bright and the decision was simple.